Immigration News Picks: Bangladeshi vs Latino in Bronx Council Race, Indian-Americans on Prime Time and Last Night’s Debate

Over at Voices of NY, Rachel Sapin and Neil Rahman profile two Bangladeshi NY City Council candidates in the Parkchester section of the Bronx running for a spot long held by Latinos. Check out the video below and read the article.

 

At New American Media, Lisa Tsering gives us a rundown of the many South Asian American actors on television this year—stars like Mindy Kaling, Kal Penn and Aziz Ansari and lesser-known actors like Kunal Nayyar, Karan Brar, Parvesh Cheena and Iqbal Theba.

She writes about the groundbreaking new show from “Office” star Mindy Kaling called the Mindy Project:

“It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your ‘portrayal’ of women. Even when I started out on ‘The Office’ eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it’s completely different,” Kaling told David Letterman on his talk show Sept. 17.

Did you notice something missing from the debate last night? In Slate, Matthew Inglesias in an article called “Immigration: The Forgotten Issue” argues that the current discussion about immigration in America is deeply flawed:

Perhaps this is the price we pay for the anachronistic and conceptually unsound decision to segregate the debates into “domestic” (i.e., budget) issues and “foreign” (i.e., bombs) issues but it’s extremely frustrating to me how the topic of immigration continues to be sequestered away from mainstream economic debate. We treat it as a kind of narrow issue of ethnic politics (working class Latinos vs working class whites) or interest groups (tech companies want to hire Indian engineers) rather than as the core economic policy question it deserves to be.

Fi2W is supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with additional support from the Ralph E. Odgen Foundation and the Sirus Fund. 

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Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2W) is an independent media outlet, journalism training program, and launchpad for emerging immigrant journalists and media makers of color. Our work brings positive and meaningful change to America's newsrooms and has a broader impact on how immigration is reported and the ethnic and racial composition of news organizations.